Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 23:36:10 -0500
Subject: Hate Crime Bill in Indiana
From: Daniel Soto Mayorga ONLY.
---The twenty-seven Indiana State Senators who defeated an amendment to the Hate
Crimes Bill of 1994 which would have included gays and lesbians among the
minorities protected by the legislation have taken an interesting, if not
unprecdented, step in Indiana legislative history. They have implicitly
created an official pariah class. The effect of this law, as now constituted,
will be simply to more closely define homosexuals as a group toward which acts
of hatred are not only acceptable but permissible. Members of the Ku Klux
Klan, and all other such professional haters, can take some solace in this.
For though it may now be somewhat more dangerous to commit hate crimes against
Blacks, Jews, Catholics or Japanese, for example, they do still have at least
one minority class of human beings which is officially unprotected, by the laws
of the State of Indiana, against crimes motivated by hatred.
One wonders how the homosexual family members (and there are several, to be
sure) of those twenty-seven senators must feel to have themselves and their
property thus placed in jeopardy by a trusted father, brother, uncle, aunt or
sister. The callousness of these twenty-seven people, charged as they are
with protecting the lives, freedoms, health and property of over five million
Hoosiers (the gay ones just as much as the straight ones), is not only
mind-numbing, it borders on the overtly criminal.
The Indiana Hate Crimes Bill is indeed very appropriately named. As it now
reads it is, in an of itself, a hate crime against all gays and lesbians.
Letter by:
Gary A. Pool
Bloomington Indiana